Last year, we conducted a survey to determine the budgeting and forecasting practices of finance professionals. Our goals were twofold: first and foremost, to understand how we could further develop our products in order to better help you do your job. But we also wanted to provide some benchmarks that would enable you to measure your work against your peers. We know a lot of finance professionals feel they spend too much time on routine tasks and not enough performing the type of value-added analysis needed to grow today’s businesses. But feeling that way and being able to prove that it’s an industry-wide problem are two different things. We wanted to get a measure that you could use to justify change, be it in work practices or the types of tools you use.

Last year’s survey found just how widespread this issue is: Approximately two-thirds of your time is spent on routine, administrative tasks of gathering data and overseeing process. While it is unreasonable to expect that we can remove all routine tasks from the budgeting and forecasting process, the facts are clear – we are wasting a lot of time that could be better spent. We hope you use this tool to effect change within your organization.

We also hope that you participate in this year’s edition of the survey. If you’re on our email list, you’ll receive a request shortly to answer our survey questions. If you’re not on our list, please sign up on our website. We know it can be hard to find 30 minutes in your day to answer these questions, but the data are invaluable, and sharing the results helps everyone in the finance profession.

For our part, we have taken a close look at the data, and feel that the upcoming enhancements to Quantrix will address some of the issues at hand, in particular easing the collection and sharing of data (and models!). Look for more news from us in the upcoming months. In the meantime, when you receive our invitation to this year’s Budgeting and Forecasting survey, we hope you’ll participate. We need your insight.